Making a good world for
Well of Souls is perhaps not as easy as it
sounds. But it can be a rewarding experience, and
your work is sure to be appreciated by the
thousands of other WoS players around the world.

These Developer
Pages are only one resource available to you as a
budding World Developer. (And trust me, you
should accept all the help you can get!). When it
comes to the actual fiddly details of which
numbers have which effect in the many data tables
you will have to craft, you should always heed
the instructions in the data file's comments
above all else. Anything else might already be
out of date, including these words here!

In an emergency,
you might also consider pressing the F1 button
while playing the game and see if the answer you
seek is in there.

You're
not alone!

Many have come before you, and
many are sure to follow. You should all keep in
touch! In addition to sharing your wisdom on the WoS World Developer's
Forum,
you can also find words of wisdom from your
fellow designers on these web sites:

Notice that the left
column (blue as I write this) has a miniature
table of contents for these Developer Pages. You
can use that to quickly pop to any page. And let
me apologize in advance for any missing pages (as
I write this, just about every page is blank!)

You'll want stuff you can
pick up and use (to hit people with,
generally). How to define items, how to
sell them, where to find them. How to
give equipment special powers. How to
define elements and spells.

These developer pages are
going to go on and on about files and tables that
you'll need to provide, or edit, as you craft
your world. If you don't know what a file or a
folder is, then you should find out a bit more
about your computer before attempting to craft a
world.

The FIRST thing
you'll want to know about your computer, is just
where you installed WoS. I'll be referring to the
"WoS Folder" a lot. If you accepted the
default installation, it will be at "C:\WoS" Otherwise, I leave it to
you to know where it is.

Inside of your
WoS folder are other folders, but the one we are
interested in is called "Worlds". All
WoS worlds live in their own folder inside of
this one. The name of a world's folder is also
the name of the world.

Hence the world
"Britannica" would be located in this
folder: WoS\Worlds\Britannica.

And I should
have chosen an example I could spell, huh? In any
case, this is what we'll be referring to as Your
World's Folder from time to time. You only own
the contents of your own world's folder, so if
you want to play with other people's worlds, be
sure to MAKE A COPY and play with the copy and
not the original.

Here's another
tip: BACKUP YOUR WORLD FOLDER REGULARLY. It's easy to make a
mistake and you could quickly lose a lot of your
work. Plus you never know, you might have the
pleasure of being the first to discover some new
bug with one of the world editor programs.

Inside your
world's folder are files (mostly .txt files that
you can edit with any text editor, including the
"/q" editor included with the game.)
But also your world folder will include
additional sub-folders of its own. These are:

MIDI
(hold's your music files, which MUST be
in .mid format)

MAPS
(holds the files which control maps and
links)

ART
(hold miscellaneous art files - optional)

MONSTERS
(holds the graphic skin files for your
monsters)

SCENES
(holds the graphic background images you
use in your scenes)

SFX
(holds the 11KHz mono .WAV files used in
your world)

Again, you might
find it educational to make a copy of someone
else's world (say "Evergreen" for
example) and fiddle with things to see what they
do. To make your life easier, you can assume that
all players possess 'evergreen' and you can
generally take advantage of an asset (a monster
skin, for example) from evergreen instead of
drawing your own. But if you do, you should
credit Josh Worts (or me, if appropriate)
for anything you borrow in that way. In general,
try to credit anyone you borrow from. In most
cases, a little credit from you is the only
recompense these people get. And now that YOU'RE
a designer, too, you'll be wanting people to give
YOU a little credit, as well!

Each sub-folder
of Evergreen includes a "readme.txt"
file which summarizes what that folder is used
for. Likewise, most .TXT files include comments
which describe in varying degrees of detail
exactly what that file can do. Some files are
modified using one of the custom Editors built
into the game itself, but most are just text
files. Here are some of the more typical text
files:

Quest.txt
(master file which defines your world)

Monsters.txt
(contains the table which defines the
monsters in your world)

Spells.txt
(contains the table which defines the
spells in your world)

Items.txt
(contains the table which controls which
items your world has)

Maps.txt
(contains the table which controls which
maps your world has)

Levels.txt
(contains the table which controls your
character classes)

Groups.txt
(contains the table which defines monster
groups)

Trophies.txt
(contains the table which defines the trophies in your world)

Racers.txt
(contains configuration data for the
racing mini-game)

Gender.ini
(contains some 'translation' values based
on character gender)

World.ini
(special file maintained by the /version
command. do not edit)

In fact, most of
these file names are optional, since the game
only loads "quest.txt"
to load your world. Inside of quest.txt you can
use the command "#include
<fileName>" to embed other files in the
middle of it. This is how a file like
"monsters.txt" gets used.

Tables
are generally organized as lists, where each line
of the table represents a different item,
monster, spell etc. On each line are a large
number of arguments separated by commas. These
form the columns of the table and each column of
a table has a very specific purpose. If you leave
out a comma, then your table will not work they
way you expect. In general, you shouldn't use
commas in names or other column entries. But
occasionally I let you get away with it if you
enclose the field in "double quotes"

Some designers
(Lady Gryphon Hawkeye, for example) use a
spreadsheet program, like Excel, to organize
their tables, and then let it generate a
"comma-separated-values" (.CSV) file
which they then turn into the actual table file
used by WoS.

Please note,
however, that Excel likes to use the fancy double
quotes (the ones with a bit of angle to them, not
the boring old computery ones that look simply
like two vertical slashes) and those won't work
right. (you'll have to manually edit them all)

You might find
some third party tool which simplifies the
editing of specific tables. However, such tools
have a hard time staying synchronized with each
new release of WoS, so a certain amount of manual
table editing is inevitable.

The
quest editor is invoked by typing "/q
<fileName>" on the chat line while
playing the game. It opens a simple text editor
which can be used to edit quest, monster, item,
spell, and other text files. After saving your
changes, use the "/reload" command to reload
the quest file. This will mark your character as
both a cheater and a modder, but as a world
developer that's what you need to be. Make a
character or two just for this purpose. For
example, type "/q monsters.txt" to open the file
containing the monster table. Note that you can
only have one file open at a time with this
editor. Use somebody else's editor if that bugs
you!

Also, use the
"/funpak" command to open a floating
diagnostic window which will fill with error
messages when you reload your world. Watch out
for warnings and error in that window.

The link
editor is accessed from within the game
itself by selecting SOLO MODE PLAY and then
selecting the bottom option "Create
Your Own World" from the world menu. Press F1
while in the game to get a brief tutorial on the
use of this editor. Be prepared to freak out. But
it's not as bad as a 3D modeling program, it just
LOOKS complicated at first.

The
Property Editor is accessed from within
the game by typing /props and allows you to
easily edit the monsters, spells, items, trophy,
and.. some other tables. You should probably only
do this in solo mode and when using your official
world-developer cheat character. It WILL modify
world files, so back up before you start, and
don't make changed you didn't mean to make

OK, you now
officially know little enough to be dangerous!
Remember: BACKUP YOUR WORK and ONLY MODIFY COPIES OF OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK.